Sensing Multispecies Encounters Art, Affect, and Ontology in Other-Than-Human Worlds

Abstract
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction: On the challenges of Sensing Multispecies Encounters
Ana Paula Motta and Andrew Meirion Jones

Part I – Multispecies Landscapes and Materials
1 Multispecies Engagements and Cosmo-Politics: A Perspective from North-Central Chile (Southern Andes)
Andrés Troncoso

2 Transtemporal Storytelling and Speculative Folklore of Extraction
Christina Fredengren

3 Kinmaking and Settle Response-ability: Cultivating Moral Obligations Through Interspecies Earth/Work
Ruth Burke

4 Visual Enchantment and Captivating Styles
Bruno Vindrola-Padrós

Part II - Multispecies Encounters
5 Multispecies Dwellings and Deep Time Encounters: Kangaroos in Australian Identities
Ana Paula Motta

6 Thinking with Un-Charismatic Mini-Fauna
Caroline Owman

7 Genghis Khan’s Golden Whip: Material-Affect through Ritualistic Self-Flagellation as Performative Justice for Racehorses
Madeleine Boyd

8 Killing for survival? Art, Landscapes and Emasculated Human-Elephant Relationships in Rhodesia (Present Day Zimbabwe), Southern Africa, c. up to the 1970s
Eddington Maseya

Afterword: Flying Fox Aesthetics
Natsha Fijn

Biography

Ana Paula Motta is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel supported by a Gerda Henkel Stiftung. Her work bridges multispecies archaeology, Indigenous studies, and decolonial theory, grounded on a dual background in anthropology and archaeology.

Andrew Meirion Jones is Professor of Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. He has taught and written extensively on the archaeology of art, particularly focusing on rock art and portable art and art-archaeology collaborations in decolonial museum contexts.

"Sensing Multispecies Encounters is wonderful in its scope in terms of thinking across species, cultures, landscapes and temporalities. This volume also pushes disciplinary boundaries to include archaeology, anthropology and art, while allowing for different sensorial and multispecies conceptual and methodological approaches".

Natsha Fijn, Associate Professor, The Australian National University

“This volume re-evaluates long-standing debates on aesthetics from a post-humanist and multispecies standpoint, to offer a powerful and necessary intervention for scholars seeking to move beyond anthropocentric models. The collection senses out the groundwork for acknowledging the agency of non-human beings and shifting paradigms for knowledge production, a worlding characterized by generative relationships, alive with camelids, silver-fish and kangaroos. The book's strength lies in its diverse, intra-active, situated explorations, bridging disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, art, history, and environmental humanities.”

Louisa Minkin, Reader Senior Lecturer in Visual Art Practices – University of the Arts London, UK

“In the growing movement to extend ways of knowing other-than-humans within various modes of relationality, this theoretically grounded collection brings art, materiality, and performance into clear focus. Its interdisciplinary case studies provide fresh means of conceptualizing how aesthetics can be seen within unfolding relationships across species and among humans, landscapes, and materials. Extending models of (human) cross-cultural aesthetics to include multispecies interactions offers a welcomed and decisive way forward for scholars, educators, and students to explore sensing multispecies encounters.”

Gala Argent, Psychology/Animal Studies Faculty Emerita – Eastern Kentucky University, USA

“This interdisciplinary collection dismantles nature/culture dichotomies, offering powerful arguments that beauty and aesthetics are not just the purview of human cultural production but generative and relational inter-species contact zones. Complex webs of human-animal relations, art, archeology and storytelling are braided into culturally diverse and transtemporal case studies. From ancient rock art to contemporary artistic practices, these essays are your thinking companions in moving away from the anthropocentric and towards the ecocentric.”

Tessa Laird, Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the School of Art – Victorian College of the Arts, Australia